‘Twas Grace That Taught My Heart To Fear

Tides of God

By Ted Reynolds

13 Dec, 2022

**Terry Carr's Third Ace Science Fiction Specials**

6 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 13 Dec, 2022

**Terry Carr's Third Ace Science Fiction Specials**

6 comments

Ted Reynold’s Tides of God is a science fiction combat-theology novel. Reynold’s debut novel, it is to date his sole work at novel length (at least so far as I am aware). Tides of God was the tenth novel featured in the Third Ace Specials and the first of those to appear after Damon Knight took over editorial duties following Terry Carr’s death in 1987.

3228: freed of the tyranny of irrational religion, the Earth enjoys an era of rationality, free love, and general prosperity. The hard work of restoring damage done to the Earth during the post-21^st century dark age is under way.

Thanks to their alien Krocerian trading partners, humanity has its first relativistic starship, Hound of Heaven. There is, however, a price to be paid. Hound of Heaven’s first voyage will be to intercept and kill God.

Among the many revelations shared with humans by the Krocs, an explanation for the thousand-year cycle of rationality and deranged religiosity that has plagued both humanity and the Krocs. A powerful alien entity — God for short — cruises through our galactic neighborhood, bombarding the worlds within range with irresistible, irrational religious messages. The mechanism by which it does this is unknown but the effect is clear: centuries of war and misery. What is also known: God’s path through the Milky Way will soon bring it back to our neighborhood.

The Krocs are reasonably certain the weapons with which the Hound of Heavenis armed will be sufficient to kill God. Being both rational and prudent, the Krocs prefer not to test this hypothesis in person. Instead, volunteers from Earth will be permitted to demonstrate how correct (or horribly wrong) the Krocs are in this matter.

While there is a certain, limited, diversity in perspectives amongst the humans of 3228, almost all humans¹ are rational entities. The consequences of God’s return would be calamitous. There is no shortage of volunteers to head into interstellar space to put an end to the divine menace.

There is just one tiny flaw in the plan. God can induce faith-based madness at a distance of several light-years. What will happen to the crew of Hound of Heaven when it is in close proximity to God?

Nothing good.

~oOo~

The Science Fiction Encyclopedia says that Tides of God was “the last of the Terry Carr Ace Specials.” I don’t know whether SFE means the series as a whole or that subset edited by Carr but the first of those is clearly incorrect — there were two more novels in the series — and the second is not supported by the “Edited by Damon Knight” on the cover. The SFE entry also seems to suggest the novel is set in the 21^st century, which is incorrect.

I don’t know if this counts as a spoiler but on the whole, the novel’s view of religion seems to incline to: religion is inherently bad and the enemy of all that is worthwhile in human (and presumably Kroc) nature.

Also, probably not a spoiler: rationality and libertarianism appear to map closely onto each other in this novel.

Religion in this novel seems to be entirely Christian in nature, judging by the messages with which God bombards Hound of Heaven. I’d be tempted to blame the simpler era in which the novel was written but the novel specifically mentions Han China as one of God’s victims. It’s not that the author is unaware that there’s a world beyond the US and Europe. It just doesn’t figure into Hound of Heaven’s experiences.

A curious coincidence: although the novels otherwise have little in common, The Tides of God isn’t the only libertarian novel about killing God to appear in the late 1980s. Victor Koman’s Prometheus-award-winner The Jehovah Contract appeared in 1987. I guess it was steam engine time for libertarian God-killing novels. Can I find three more examples for Tor? Would they publish an essay on the subject if I did?

I myself am an entirely rational non-believer whose views of the net effect of religion on civilization are not entirely positive. Logic suggests I should have been a nearly ideal audience for the novel. Alas! Even leaving aside the obligatory creepy sex stuff characteristic of the era, this is at best a curate’s egg. The characters are so uncompelling I couldn’t be bothered to name any of them and the plot kind of falls apart the moment one asks, “why would the Krocs send a crewedship to intercept God when uncrewed missiles are not known for crises of faith²?”

One point to the author: the second question a reader might ask (after “why used a crewed ship?”) is “given the scale of the Milky Way and the light-speed limit, how is it God manages to visit us as frequently as once every thousand years?” There is in fact a perfectly reasonable answer to that question, which I will not spoil.

Tides of God is out of print³.

1: Aside from a few pitiful remnants of religious communities.

2: Generally speaking. There have been exceptions. There is no God but God and Skashskash is his Prophet.

3: Ten books into a twelve-book series is either a bit late to suddenly introduce a chart tracking certain aspects of the series or two books too early. Nevertheless, the running count for how many of the Third Ace Specials novels are still in print is as follows. Note that this only covers the books I have reviewed and that it does not cover the books I have not reviewed.

Title	Author	In Print?	Author’s Sole Novel
The Wild Shore	Kim Stanley Robinson	Yes	No
Green Eyes	Lucius Shepard	Yes	No
Neuromancer	William Gibson	Yes	No
Palimpsests	Carter Scholz and Glenn Harcourt	No	Yes
Them Bones	Howard Waldrop	Yes	No⁴
In the Drift	Michael Swanwick	Yes	No
The Hercules Text	Jack McDevitt	Yes	No
The Net	Loren J. MacGregor	No	Yes
Metrophage	Richard Kadrey	Yes	No
The Tides of God	Ted Reynolds	No	Yes

4: However, Waldrop’s only other novel preceded Them Bones by more than a decade.

Comments

DemetriosX

Maybe Carr acquired the novel, but died or became too ill before or very early in the editing process, thus making Knight the official editor.

That 1000-year cycle with religious overtones sounds familiar. I wonder if Joe Straczynski read this.

Finally, it's interesting that those who wrote other novels still have their Ace Special novels still in print, while those that didn't don't. It looks like correlation, but MacGregor and Harcourt essentially wrote nothing else, Scholz wrote quite a few shorter works, though not a lot, and Reynolds wrote a lot, but interrupted his career for a decade and a half. Maybe it's just coincidence.

Jan VanekDemetriosX

The opening page says "I wish to acknowledge the invaluable help of those who ungrudgingly gave of their time (and certainly endangered their friendship) by freely criticizing early drafts, always for the better: Guy Snyder, Tim Reynolds, Charles Oliver, Damon Knight, Leo Frankowski, an anonymous female, and most especially, Terry Carr, to whose memory this book is dedicated." The book is dated February 1989, Carr died April 1987, so it seems likely that both worked on it in some form, especially if it took a lot of work.

Um, Ted Reynolds published 18 stories – one each in 1953 (when he was 15), 2012 and 2015 (in collaboration), the rest between 1977–96, never collected. I wouldn't call it "a lot"; Scholz actually has a bibliography more than twice longer. (Might you have been thinking of some other of SF's many Reynoldses?)

Also, SFE / John Clute calls Scholz's 2015 Gypsy a novel, even though it was quite short and published within a collection (or an issue of F&SF); ISFDB stays with novella.

But yes, it seems that these Ace Specials were, with one spectacular exception, more of brighter points on a few rising stars' upward tracks (with several inevitable fizzles) than particularly timeless works. Interestingly, SFE claims "The impact of this sequence was perhaps even greater in its second iteration, for it included in its first eighteen months at least six first novels whose reputation has lasted"; the 1993/5 editions, when they must have been in fresher memory (and space was limited) does not include the "at least..." explanation and goes straight for the listing.

Of course, SFE/Clute is also plain... um, incorrect describing the plot as "deranging Alien being whose expected arrival from deep space as the twentieth century ends spurs the mounting of an expedition to destroy it" (not sure whether this justifies James's paraphrase "seems to suggest the novel is set in the 21st century"). Guess I'll send in a correction, unless somebody else wants to do that.

Stewart

If it was the author's sole novel it's not in print. If it was not the author's sole novel it is in print. The sample size is rather small, but the correlation is striking.

Jan VaněkStewart

It might be interesting to test with a time machine and... say, means to persuade Gibson to fake his death and start under a new pseudonym. But yeah, this would be best an exception to the general rule.

Rich Horton

The very last of the third series of Ace Special was Gregory Feeley's The Oxygen Barons, which was definitely edited by Damon Knight. I would assume the 11th -- Black Snow Days, by Claudia O'Keeffe -- was also a Knight project. (I have read short stories by O'Keeffe but I don't remember them -- this is her only novel. I assume it's out of print. I had never heard of it until I looked up the Ace Specials.)

The Oxygen Barons is out of print. Feeley has published one other novel, Arabian Wine (2005), which is probably out of print but it's from a small press so I don't know for sure. Both novels are well worth reading. Greg has finished at least two other novels, and I have read parts of both (much of one has appeared as separate short stories) -- and I can say that both are books are very much look to forward to, if they sell. Perhaps at that time The Oxygen Barons would have a chance to return to print.

Jan VanekRich Horton

Yup, the #10 to 12 all have on the cover "Edited by Damon Knight" (and "Terry Carr's Ace Science Fiction Specials"; the first 9 had "Edited by Terry Carr" and "The New Ace Science Fiction Specials" – ISFDB can be useful here).

So either the SFE's phrasing is supposed to mean that this was the transitional, last of them where Carr had had a substantial input as hinted by the dedication (the final two came more than a year later), or... I checked and the Reynolds entry is practically unchanged from the 1995 CD-ROM (and, presumably the 1993 book); so I could imagine even that the entry was written BEFORE the final two appeared, put aside as not needing any updates, and sent to print where no other editor caught this.